Word.ws English Dictionary

rip-roaring

rip-roaring adjective: exciting, energetic, enthusiastic, with gusto.

Adjective

rip-roaring (comparative more rip-roaring, superlative most rip-roaring)

  1. (informal) Exciting, energetic, enthusiastic, with gusto.
    • It was a rip-roaring bar fight, until the cops broke it up.
    • The brain matches the mind-image of doughnuts to images and emotions stored in his brain’s memory regions: “Mmmm … doughnuts.” Then—bingo!—his brain’s dopamine-producing reward centres light up and have a rip-roaring hootenanny.2012 December 21, Monique Keiran, “Humans get more nutrition from tastier food”, in Times Colonist, 155th year, number 10, Victoria, B.C.: TC Publication Limited Partnership, →ISSN, →OCLC, page A13...

Forms of rip-roaring

comparativemore rip-roaring
superlativemost rip-roaring

Origin of rip-roaring

From rip + roaring.

Words formed from rip-roaring

Questions about rip-roaring

What does rip-roaring mean?
Rip-roaring means exciting, energetic, enthusiastic, with gusto.
What part of speech is rip-roaring?
Rip-roaring is an adjective.

Words near rip-roaring in the dictionary

  1. rip-off merchant
  2. rip-off merchants
  3. rip-offs
  4. rip-rap
  5. rip-raps
  6. rip-roaring
  7. rip-roaringly
  8. rip-roarious
  9. rip-snorting mad
  10. RIPA
  11. ripamatic

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: rip-roaring (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “rip-roaring.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/rip-roaring. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.